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Mike Romberg
Mike Romberg
Mike Romberg
bgrayson
romberg
Read Me
XOSVIEW
xosview is a program that gathers information from your
operating system and displays it in graphical form.
It attempts to show you in a quick glance an overview of how
your system resources are being utilized.
It can be configured to be nothing more than a small strip
showing a couple of parameters on a desktop task bar. Or it
can display dozens of meters and rolling graphical charts over
your entire screen.
Since xosview renders all graphics with core X11 drawing
methods, you can run it on one machine and display it on
another. This works even if your other host is an operating
system not running an X server inside a virtual machine running
on a physically different host. If you can connect to it on
a network, then you can popup an xosview instance and monitor
what is going on.
* Current known working platforms:
- Linux (tested on fedora-27 but almost anything should work)
- Gnu Hurd (debian 2018-01-12)
- Solaris (tested on OpenIndiana hipster 2018-01-12)
- NetBSD (7.1.1)
- FreeBSD (11.1)
- OpenBSD (6.2)
- Dragonfly BSD (5.0.2)
- cygwin (displayed stats are for windows)
- minix (3.4.0rc6 dev snapshot)
* To build xosview:
In general, you should be able to build xosview by following these
steps:
./configure
make
make install
There are a few optional features you may be interested in. So,
you may want to checkout 'configure --help' as it will show you
options you can change such as the install prefix. These switches
may be used to help locate optional (or required) libraries
if the configure script is unable to do so by itself.
A C++ compiler which supports c++14 or better is required to build xosview.
The configure script will attempt to test the compiler for this support and
set any flags that may be needed. If the configure script does not locate
the correct compiler, you may specify another one with
'configure CXX=path_to_your_compiler'.
The configure script will attempt to look for the xpm library to load
background images with. It will also look for the Xft library for freetype2
font support. If configure fails to find any of these libraries and you
wish to have the xosview features they depend on you may need to use your
systems package manager to install "dev" packages for these libraries. If
they are installed in locations configure can not find an option to the
configure script may help locate them (see configure --help).
Please see the README file for the platform you are building on for
further details.
Edit Makefile.config for your setup, if you wish to change
anything from the default settings, such as the optimization
flags. This of course, should be done before one runs make.
This step should rarely be needed.
Run make to build xosview. The makefiles use features that are supported
by GNU make and BSD make. If your make reports errors with the Makefiles
(probably solaris make) then you will need to install and use gnu make to
do the build.
* To install xosview
- short version: 'make install'
- slightly longer version:
The xosview configure script and makefile support Gnu conventions
(https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Directory-Variables.html).
So, controlling exactly where the 'make install' will put things can be
done by using any one of those methods.
By default configure will use a prefix of /usr/local you may want
to change this by adding a --prefix argument when you run the script.
One can run 'make -n install' to get a quick preview of what files
will be installed and where. There are not many of them.
Note: xosview will hard code a path to an app-defaults directory into
the binary *at compile time*. This location is based on the prefix
*at comiple time*. If you are later going to change this prefix (by
say changing it when you run make install) then you can set the compiled
in location with the configure option --with-app-defaults=DIR
* To run xosview :
The binary should start up and run without any fuss after being
built. If you give it a -h or --help command line option it
will show a brief list of all the command line options. For
more information (see the man page)
The xosview binary contains a complete set of default options. It
should run right out of the box from anywhere. But, it does
search for other options in standard locations. See the man page
for full details. Note: you can read the man page without installing
it by running 'zcat xosview.1 | groff -lascii -mandoc - | less -R' or
'man ./xosview.1'.
Please see the README file for your platform for any special
instructions for running xosview on that platform.
* To configure xosview
Out of the box xosview will start up using it's default configuration
of meter colors, fonts and values. It will also look for X resource
values to override these defaults in the normal X locations. There are
at least ten of these places and xosview checks them all (see the man
page).
The default configuration may not be to your taste. So, you can change
one or more of the hundreds of options by setting an X resource
(see the man page). The easiest way to do this is to add a file to
your home directory called .Xdefaults (see the man page). It should
be noted that xosview will read this file (if it exsists) even if
your desktop environment failed to do so. So, it will always work.
There are some alternative Xdefault "themes" you can try out as examples
by loading them with the -c option (see the man page). If you come up
with a nice set of options you would like to share with others please
contact the developers on the sourceforge website.
Stipple support:
Also, NetBSD-mac68k people (and others) that have monochrome systems
may want to try out the stipple code -- set the enableStipple
resource to true, and choose black and white for the various
fields. The fields are automatically stippled 100%, 75%, 50%, and
25% in a fixed fashion (future versions may allow the user to
specify the stipple percentage).
* To work with the source code as developer:
See the file README.devel which contains details about git, autoconf
gcc, makefiles and internal workings of the code.
